Gender and the Body in the Late Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey
Panel VIII-20, 2021 Annual Meeting
On Friday, December 3 at 11:30 am
Panel Description
Gendered embodiment is a rich area of scholarly research in Middle Eastern Studies. Yet in the context of Turkey, both modern and Ottoman, this area of study remains in its early stages. As such, this panel proposes to examine the importance of bringing gendered embodiment, and particularly masculinity and the male body, to center stage in understanding processes of social and political formation between Late Ottoman, modern, and contemporary Turkey.
The first paper examines the centrality of the male body and masculinity to military conscription during the Ottoman First World War. Drawing upon Ottoman archival documents, legal regimes, ego documents, and press materials, it analyzes how the establishment of a normative male military body provided a framework for mediating embodiments of masculinity within late. Ottoman society.
The second paper examines the female body in the late Ottoman Empire through the story of a young woman named Şaziye. The analysis focuses on the female body as a site of contestation during the First World War, arguing that the issue of abortion provides instructive insight into how wartime policies toward the body were gendered, and how wartime concerns continued to guide early Republican policies on abortion and female sexuality.
The third paper examines how the medicalization of male circumcision in Turkey has transformed the young male body from a physical body to an affective body. It argues that the biomedicalization of male circumcision during the developmentalist era rested upon the notion of a physical body whose physical pain could be eliminated by medical professionals, while the psychologization of male circumcision in the neoliberal era regards the body as vulnerable to psychic pain/trauma, leading medical professionals have incorporated this affective body into the consumer body.
The fourth paper focuses on how ordinary men circulate conspiracy theories to forge themselves as political subjects and, in the process, overgrow their bodily extents as agents of the state. The analysis particularly focuses on conspiratorial accounts that imagine threats targeting the corporeality of men, such as genetically-modified seeds, and underline how bodies of everyday actors become the interfaces upon which state power is issued forth.
Drawing on historical, anthropological, and sociological approaches to the study of gender and the body between the Late Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey, this panel probes how gendered bodies have served as sites of conflict, control, and change, reflecting broader political and social trends in the making of modern Turkey.
Most research on abortion in the late Ottoman Empire has focused on the Tanzimat era, when the Ottoman government issued a number of decrees beginning in 1838 criminalizing abortion. There has been comparatively less attention paid to the 20th century, specifically to the Young Turk era. Measures that were initiated during the Tanzimat targeted doctors, pharmacists, and midwives who performed abortions or who provided abortifacients. At the same time, these measures did not address women who had abortions themselves beyond warning them that they would face spiritual punishment in the afterlife. One possibility for this is that during the Tanzimat era, issues related to the so called-private sphere, such as the family, women, inheritance, and children were still considered to fall under the domain of Islamic law. Abortion was also considered part of the private sphere and subsequently treated as an issue best left to the Sharia. In the twentieth century, however, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) took more aggressive centralizing measures against religious courts, culminating in the adoption of the 1917 Law of Family Rights. I suggest that abortion policy under the CUP must be understood against this backdrop.
My research centers on a case study of a young woman named Şaziye and her own 1916 narrative that describes the circumstances which led to her child’s abortion. The analysis focuses on the female body as a site of contestation during the First World War and illustrates the Ottoman state’s increasingly large role in policing the female body. Şaziye’s narrative suggests that under the CUP, the female body itself was targeted for punishment in the event that a woman had an abortion, in contrast to the Tanzimat period. However, Ottoman attitudes toward questions on female sexuality and the female body were still ambivalent in practice. On the one hand, late Ottoman discourses of womanhood privileged women’s roles as wives and mothers, yet on the other, men who violated female bodies and who facilitated abortions faced inconsistent penalties from the state. As such, the research argues that the issue of abortion provides instructive insight into how wartime policies toward the body were gendered and offers a preliminary investigation into CUP policy on abortion and its differences with the Tanzimat period.
This paper examines how the medicalization of male circumcision in Turkey has, over more than a century, transformed the young male body from a physical body to an affective body. Two main forms of medicalization can be observed in the history of male circumcision: biomedicalization and psychologization. The biomedicalization of male circumcision during the developmentalist era (1960s-1980s) rested upon the notion of a physical body whose physical pain could be eliminated by medical professionals via medical instruments. In contrast the psychologization of male circumcision that has emerged during the neoliberal era (1980s-present) regards the young male body in male circumcision as a body that is vulnerable to psychic pain/trauma and medical professionals have incorporated this affective body into the consumer body, whose comfort and pleasure they seek to meet.
This paper focuses on how ordinary men circulate conspiracy theories to forge themselves as political subjects and, in the process, overgrow their bodily extents as agents of the state. The analysis particularly focuses on conspiratorial accounts that imagine threats targeting the corporeality of men, such as genetically-modified seeds, and underline how bodies of everyday actors become the interfaces upon which state power is issued forth. The paper concludes with a discussion on how the circulation of conspiracy theories engenders vigilantism and paramilitary violence in contemporary Turkey and how masculine bodies become the primary sites of this radical reconfiguration.
